Dr. David Goldfield, a professor of Southern history, figures that Alabama is still best known for the Birmingham civil rights struggles of 1963.

Yet Goldfield, who lived in Homewood in the 1970s and teaches at University of North Carolina-Charlotte, said Alabama today is also well known for beautiful women, Tide football and automobile manufacturing.

“That is a weird list,” said Diane McWhorter.

McWhorter, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her insight into Birmingham history in “Carry Me Home,” said she might have suggested obesity. And later she adds civility to a list of outside perceptions of Alabama.

But like Goldfield, McWhorter also figures most deeper notions about the state still turn on 50-year-old images of fire hoses and police dogs. Yet she thinks the battle lines have moved, that today Alabama is best known for its hard line on illegal immigration.

The Mercedes auto manufacturing plant in Vance Alabama is being expanded for production of the C Class vehicle that will go on sale in 2014. (Joe Songer/jsonger@al.com)

David Person’s editorial last year on Alabama’s immigration law, playing to a national audience in USA Today, begins: “Here in the South it feels like the 1960s all over again.”

McWhorter, writing in The New York Times last summer, asked: “If Alabama, the cradle of the civil rights movement, can retool Jim Crow as Juan Crow, what have we learned?”

Yet Dr. Jess Brown, a political science professor, predicts that within another generation the public, at least those beyond the Alabama state line, will no longer remember the name George Wallace. Nor the black and white images of police dogs. Nor the schoolhouse door.

“Those kinds of scars in history fade slowly,” said Brown, who worked for the University of Alabama system during Wallace’s last term as governor and now teaches at Athens State. But the images are fading, he contends.

And he doesn’t believe that the immigration law had much lasting effect on the state’s reputation.

“We wouldn’t get the open-minded award,” said Brown of public perceptions in other states. “They would still view us a place that is largely uneducated and poor and whatever, but I don’t think they’d see us as bigoted as non-Alabamians would a generation ago.”

Diane McWhorter (photo by Annette Hornischer)

“It is fairly pleasant place to live and people are nice and there’s a lot to be said for it,” said McWhorter, but she said perceptions of racial intolerance have a basis in reality, one people living in Alabama tend to miss or dismiss as unfounded.

“What does it take for people in Alabama to recognize they are founded?” she asked.

She points to state legislators who stated publicly that the immigration law was an attempt to make life so uncomfortable as to encourage self-deportation. “There is no way that was misunderstood,” she said.

Brown disagrees. “This issue of immigration, I’m not so sure that mainstream opinion in Alabama is all that different from mainstream opinion of non-Hispanic Caucasians in Colorado,” he said. “We might be a little more intense about it. But there is still a debate out there and I think it’s more economic than racial.”

Alabama Headlines

In late 2012, nearly half a century after Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, Alabama voters once again failed to remove racist language from the state constitution.

Educators and African-American groups lined up to oppose the redaction. Republicans favored it. Democrats argued the change might open the door for doing away with the right to attend public schools. Republicans said that wasn’t the case.

That twist, both complicated and insular, kept the news coverage outside Alabama to a minimum. There were a few national headlines, but nothing sticking it to the state as backwards or unrepentantly racist. These tended toward head-scratching reports in back pages.

Jocelyn Maza Ventura, 5, stands with her family and other supporters of the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice gather during a vigil on Feb. 5, 2013, in Montgomery, Ala. (Julie Bennett / jbennett@al.com)

“Alabama’s larger challenge at this point is not what’s in the constitution,” said Person, who lives in Huntsville. “The larger problem we’re facing right now is the perception that when it comes to immigrants, undocumented immigrants, we are not a welcoming place.”

A search of newspaper reports over the last couple years finds far more headlines declaiming Alabama’s immigration law than any current news involving black-and-white race relations. “Alabama's Disgrace” read The New York Times editorial. “A bad road for Alabama,” wrote The Los Angeles Times, including the line: “Sadly, the Alabama Legislature once again proved itself incapable of embarrassment.” Many publications employed the phrase “Juan Crow,” a clear throwback to struggles decades ago.

“I think the image of Alabama still lingers from the 1960s,” said Goldfield. “The reality, I think, is that Alabama is hardly alone in its concern over immigration. But reality and memory are two different things.”

Mallory Hagan, an Alabama native competing as Miss New York, was crowned Miss America on Jan. 12, 2013, in Las Vegas. Southern history professor David Goldfield said in addition to civil rights struggles, Alabama today is perhaps known for beautiful women and auto plants. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken)

McWhorter and Goldfield agree on this point. McWhorter points out that Arizona had the excuse of a pressing problem, namely that Arizona, unlike Alabama, is a border state. Instead, Alabama’s attempts at immigration enforcement are quickly folded into memories of its civil rights rap sheet.

“It’s not forever. We have come a long way in the South,” says Goldfield, who did not hear about the efforts to eliminate the racist language from the state constitution. “It’s a mark of how far we’ve come,” said Goldfield that the issue did not command national attention.

There were other images of Alabama in the news over the last year. The state earned mention in thousands of newspaper stories linked to obesity, but Mississippi and national trends stole the headlines. There were some nationwide stories about UAH shooter Amy Bishop pleading guilty, about Alabama isolating HIV positive inmates, about Roy Moore winning re-election. “Alabama chief justice scary” wrote the Monterey County Herald in California last month.

But few headlines seem to travel as far and wide as those connected to the familiar events of 1963.

“Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, 89, Dies; Fought on Front Lines for Civil Rights” wrote The New York Times in October of 2011. “Last of the movement's 'Big Three' endured beatings, bombings and fire-hosings” reminded the Ottawa Citizen, and “Baptist preacher and courageous civil rights movement leader in Alabama” read the obituary in The Guardian in London.

The passing of James Hood, who Wallace had attempted to block during the “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent integration of the University of Alabama, earned similar headlines last month atop historic recounts in The New York Times, USA Today, in newspapers in London, and smaller papers across the country.

Coach Nick Saban after the University of Alabama defeated Notre Dame to win the BCS National Championship on Jan. 7, 2013. (Vasha Hunt/vhunt@al.com)

When it comes to state identity, only Alabama football seems to receive equal attention. “NOTRE LAME NO MATCH FOR TIDE” proclaimed The New York Post last month, as hundreds of publications celebrated or lamented the success of the Crimson Tide.

“What was a surprise to me was how delighted everyone was for me over the national championship,” said McWhorter, seeing in this some sign of improvement.

Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham served as the backdrop of several protests and demonstrations, including the beatings and arrests of young demonstrators in May of 1963. (Tamika Moore | tmoore@al.com)

McWhorter is currently a fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard. When she was in college in the 1970s, she said, no one congratulated her when the Tide won. “Alabama was so bad they didn’t have the right to brag about anything,” said McWhorter.

Alabama today

McWhorter refers to herself as an expat, defined by her home state, which she views with alternating pride and shame. For instance, she said the reason that segregation worked in Alabama is that “there was this overlay of civility.” Both black and white citizens were so used to being around one another, there was more communication across racial lines than in other parts of the country. She points out the communication may not have been on equal, but the communication remains.

“The black middle-class presence in Birmingham is certainly much more apparent than anywhere else I’ve been, certainly more than New York,” she said.

Several whitetail deer graze in a timber cut early Monday morning September 10, 2012 near Springville Alabama. David Person suggested the natural beauty of Alabama is little known beyond state lines. (The Birmingham News/Joe Songer).

McWhorter, who wrote recently that a Birmingham News reporter and executive were aware of a plot to assassinate Shuttlesworth, spoke of a black man recently harassed by police in Boston for walking in a mostly white neighborhood. “It’s not just the South,” she said.

And it’s not just the 1960s.

Goldfield mentioned a black man who was killed 25 years ago after wandering into a white neighborhood in Queens in New York City. He recalled the mayor then saying something like: “’We cannot tolerate this, we’re not like Mississippi or Alabama.’ And I’m thinking yes you are.”

“The rest of the country chooses to see this state as this aberration that it can dismiss, but actually it’s a mirror,” said McWhorter. “The true story of the South is not wanting to see yourself in it.”

Frankly, she said, the South is less tolerant, but just further along the spectrum. “It is not an aberration.”

Person said he hasn’t encountered much positive in outside perceptions of Alabama.

David Person, who lives in Huntsville, writes editorials about Alabama for USA Today

“But that’s not really surprising because people don’t really know our state, the natural beauty, the generous spirit of the people,” he said.

“Coming from Chicago I was stunned to find in Huntsville there were some neighborhoods where blacks and whites were living together. I was stunned to find in public you could hold conversations with white people, that white men would hold doors for me, that white women would speak to me and not clutch their purses,” said Person, who is black. “I didn’t have any positive interaction with white people growing up in Chicago.”

“Most of the people I run into who have been to Alabama really like it,” said McWhorter. She mentioned the growing reputation of Birmingham for fine dining.

“I think the key thing that maybe history has not chronicled well enough,” said Person, “while the institutional structures of racism were certainly well in place, and the caretakers of those structures were living up to worst examples, the reality is on a grassroots level, on a one-to-one level, on a family level, there were still some elements of family that were preserved between the races.”

Person said perhaps the rest of the country, especially those who have not been to Alabama, may be surprised that black and white residents were never completely cut off from another. “I think there was more of an element of community,” he said.

A half century after the historic zenith of the civil rights movement, Brown offered an even simpler assessment of national perceptions of Alabama. “We’re not on their radar screen. We have a non-image,” said Brown.

But a non-image would make it difficult to explain the joke behind The Onion’s satirical headlines this month: “PR Firm Advises U.S. To Cut Ties With Alabama.”